Revit 2011 Solar Radiation Technology Preview

The Revit labs have come out with a great tool for sustainable design. This tool allows you to examine solar radiation on various surfaces of your building information model. The amount of solar energy is based on the buildings location and weather data in the model. You can download the preview here: Download the Free Solar Radiation Technology Preview from Autodesk Labs

What a great tool to help you decide where to place your PV Panels for maximum efficiency.

Check out the video here: Solar Radiation Technology Preview Video

I hope this also works with Revit 2011 MEP. If it does I will check it out and see what the reports that it generates can do for us electrical engineers.

Cooper B-Line has Revit Cable Tray Families

For those of us still needing to use Revit 2009 and 2010, Cooper B-line has made some nice cable tray families for us to use. I was stuck for a long time with using ducts or custom made families that didn't really work properly. These seem to be working fairly well so far.

The one thing that I have noticed is that they seem to still show an interference when you put a corner on them. That is, when you do an interference check, there is conflicts with equipment that doesn't intersect your cable tray. I t is like the cable tray extends past the corner and into what it is interfering with even though you cannot see it in any view.

 As you can see, Revit is telling me that the duct (in red) is hitting the cable tray (selected) when they are obviously not. You can tell from the interferences on the list that this is happening in a number of different places.

As long as you and your mechanical engineer are fine with checking these conflicts manually, these cable trays come together quite fine. They are pretty easy to use and configure. You can download them here:

http://www.cooperbline.com/contact/BIM.htm

Proxy Graphics Warning Messages

I have started using AutoCAD 2011and setting up the UI so it is like my AutoCAD 2010 installation.

I have noticed that I am getting this message when I am opening some older projects and architectural files created with systems older than ACAD 2007:

If I cannot download the object enabler for the objects that are contained in the drawing, I will always get this message. No matter what option I pick at this point, the next time you open the drawing, I will see this message again.

To make sure these objects are shown every time, type in the following command:

PROXYSHOW

Set this to “1” to get a graphic display of the objects in question. If you set it to “0”, then the graphics will not show. If you set it to “2”, then you will get a bounding box around where the object should be.

Now to never get that warning message again, type in the following command:

PROXYNOTICE

Set this to “0” and that Proxy Information box will not show up again when you are opening these types of drawings.

Alternately, you can find this setting here in the Options menu under the Open and Save tab:

 

Work with AutoCAD Architecture Plans with Vanilla AutoCAD

Most of my office uses vanilla AutoCAD to produce electrical engineering documents. This is fine most of the time for when we receive documents from the architect in 2d format. But sometimes it starts to act funny when we get 3D walls and doors to work with.

At first I tried to explode all of the AEC blocks in order to break them down to 2D objects to make them easier to work. This usually required a bunch of steps of exploding a block and then deleting some and exploding more blocks to get down to the lines that are found at a Z=0 level. The trick was to isolate only the AEC objects and explode them. You didn't want to explode the normal 2D blocks.

If you don’t want to explode other blocks or try to find all the AEC objects, you can use this handy command to just convert the AEC objects to autocad objects.

-AECTOACAD   This command creates another file with all of the AEC objects converted to autocad objects and flattened. It is a lot smaller that exploding everything in the drawing.

I choose the prefix option from the drop down menu and AutoCAD prefixes the new file with a ACAD-. Then hit "F" for filename and autocad will show you the path and the new filename for the drawing it will create. It defaults to the same directory of the file you are working on. This makes it easy to find your converted file when you are done.

I can't quite see what that says.

Here is an interesting trick to make text more visible if I need to use it on top of architecture and lines in AutoCAD. It is called the background mask for mtext.

You can access it here when you have the mtext editor open:

Then select Background Mask...

You get a window like this:

 

Be sure to check the Use drawing background color box and the border offset factor to something just slightly larger than the text. I thought 1.2 was pretty good.

You can use this to get our text to show up better when it is on top of architectural items that make it hard to read the text. I don't like to place text over lines or architecture but if I have to, I like to use this method. I don’t need to use it all the time but it would be useful in some situations.

Uncheck the "Use drawing background color" to use a different background to highlight the text box if you want.